SMS Backup+ was a popular app back in the day, and for many, it's still indispensable. For the unfamiliar, it's an open source app that allows you to back up your SMS and MMS messages into a simple and intuitive conversation view in Gmail, so not only are they automatically stored elsewhere, you can quickly and easily sort through them.

Up until recently, the app looked a bit dated, with a decidedly Holo-esque aesthetic and no updates since 2015, but a new beta version (1.5.11-beta8) was just released with some UI modernization and other improvements.

As a tech enthusiast with the brains and taste to prefer Android over the other options, you're probably someone who also appreciates the need for privacy and security. You may even keep a spare "burner" phone for when you travel to some less-than-confidence-inspiring situations like hacker conferences or the Winter Olympics. But what if you needed something even more powerful to protect data and even physical objects of monumental importance?

Like any organization set up by the Joint Development Foundation, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a group of companies set up to collaborate on the introduction of a technological standard. In the case of AOMedia, its purpose is specifically to accelerate the development and adoption of a new video compression codec called AV1.

Your phone is a powerhouse compared to even the most impressive supercomputers from a few decades ago, and most of the time that power isn't being put to good use. The [email protected] project is all about harnessing unused CPU cycles from multiple devices and machines across the world in order to solve big medical problems. The Android app has been available for a few years, but it's now officially open source.

Every year for the past few years, Google releases an app for I/O attendees. Then, a few months afterwards, the company uploads the app's source code to GitHub. This year's I/O app was aptly named "Google I/O 2017," and now, if you're an Android developer, you can go through its source code to see what new techniques you can implement into your own app(s).

Archos has tried its hand at making various cheap, media-focused Android tablets, none of which were very good. It eventually released a version of its video player app on the Play Store, where it garnered a few million downloads. Now, Archos has released the source code for its video player app. You can head over to Git Hub to download the source, but it's still on the Play Store, too.

The Honor 6X began receiving the Nougat-based EMUI 5.0 update back in early May. It's been nearly three months since then, and Huawei has finally released this budget smartphone's kernel source code. You can now expect to see more development for the 6X in the near future.

A lot of smartphone makers get around to releasing kernel sources whenever they feel like. It might be a month or two after a device is released or updated, but it happens. OnePlus, to its credit, is much faster. The OnePlus 5 has only just been announced, but the open source files are already available for download.

Today Google has announced the release of MobileNets, a series of TensorFlow vision models built for comparatively low-power, low-speed platforms like mobile devices. In a cross-post on both the Open Source and Research blogs, Google released details about the new visual recognition software. Now even more useful machine learning tools can operate natively on your phone’s hardware, in a fast and accurate way. And, future tools like Google Lens will be able to perform more functions locally, without as much need for mobile data, and without waiting.

If you're considering building a new VR game or app experience, you may be facing new challenges in how to create realistic scenes, how to move your characters across space without dizzying the player, and how to choose between click and gesture controls depending on what's best for your setting.

Daydream Elements is a new open-source app by Google that provides tech demos for many scenarios regarding these 3 areas: locomotion, menus and virtual controls, and rendering and lighting. There's also a full documentation page with explanations and details on each aspect, plus the source code on GitHub, so you should have everything at your disposal.